An audio guide accompanying the exhibition is available in Russian and English. Audio guides are available from Garage Information Desk for 100 rubles.
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<div class="ex-modal__content__row">
The exhibition is wheelchair accessible
<a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link" href="/ru/visit/disabled_visitors?kind=blind">Learn more</a></div>
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Russian Sign Language Tours of Spring Exhibitions
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Garage Museum of Contemporary Art organizes regularly scheduled events for visitors with disabilities. <a class="ex-modal__content__text ex-modal__content__link ex-modal__content__inline" href="/en/visit/disabled_visitors?kind=blind">Learn more</a>.

Individual Tours,&nbsp;Tours for Students and Schoolchildren, and a&nbsp;Day at Garage.You just need to choose the tour that's best for you.
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The Fabric of Felicity

&nbsp;(b. 1944, Stockholm, Sweden; lives and works in Stockholm)
Shirt, 2018 Textile print, sizes S, M, L Courtesy of the artist
Images on garments usually reflect features that we want to help us stand out from the crowd, even if not for long: our sense of humor, our political views, our love for a particular mass culture phenomenon. In her limited series of shirts designed specifically for The Fabric of Felicity, the Swedish artist Marie-Louise Ekman went further and drew an encyclopedia on a garment. The intended wearer identifies themselves with the world and humanity rather than with particular objects or images. This approach is characteristic for Ekman, who rethinks sexual and social roles using the language of comics. Danish researcher Lars Bang Larsen places Marie-Louise Ekman alongside contemporaries who &ldquo;made the sign &lsquo;woman&rsquo; a seemingly endless concept.&rdquo; Since the late 1960s, Ekman has been involved in the struggle for women&rsquo;s rights on a variety of fronts, from fine art and theater to newspaper op-eds on socially important topics. In 1984, she became the first female professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Ekman&rsquo;s work affirms not so much the concept of universal equality as the inalienable right of all people to look ridiculous and to use an important tool for regulating mental health: self-deprecation.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Marie-Louise Ekman

(b. 1961, Alexandria; lives and works in Cairo)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF4%20(1).jpg" alt="" width="1067" height="1600" />
Merge and Emerge, 2011 3 videos, 6&rsquo; 25&rdquo; each, looped Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano | Beijing | Les Moulins | Habana
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Three dervishes whirl, throwing out their arms and then pressing their hands to their chests. Their skirts open like flower buds, the figures move as if in zero gravity, approaching and almost touching each other. The sensation of fragile, elusive balance and the expectation of an imminent collision are in tune with the rebellious mood in Egypt during the Arab Spring. The dervish dance is an integral part of collective worship, in which adepts attempt to achieve ecstatic fusion with God. This mystical journey represents a constant mutual transition between &ldquo;the hidden&rdquo; and &ldquo;the manifest,&rdquo; the fundamental concepts of Islamic philosophy. In Seeing Through Clothes, the fashion historian Anne Hollander writes: &ldquo;much ethnic dress or folk costume [&hellip;] has the quality of [&hellip;] reducing the [wearer] to a symbol-bearing abstraction.&rdquo; In the work of Moataz Nasr, the ecstatic ritual is presented as a process of transforming higher abstract concepts into understandable phenomena of optics and geometry, in which clothing plays a key role. The Sufis are dressed in red, green, and blue: the basic colors of the RGB model, which optically add up to sacral white. The dancers are shown from above: their ritual uniform, unfolded in a single plane, forms a circle: a universal form capable of representing great impersonal forces, be it God, the orbital motion of the planets (gravity), or infinity.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Moataz Nasr

(b. 1981, Lisbon; lives and works in Lisbon)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF5%20(2).jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="1600" />
The Growing Museum: assemblage I (version III), 2016&ndash;2018 Japanese WWII boy&rsquo;s kimono, Art Nouveau 24&rdquo; (70cm) 1920s/1930s nurse&rsquo;s belt in EPNS &ldquo;silver,&rdquo; Yoruba lost wax bronze ring coin, 110 x 100 x 8 cm Courtesy of the artist
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Carlos Noronha Feio&rsquo;s The Growing Museum brings together artifacts from a variety of origins: geographical, cultural, and historical. Each new assemblage created by the artist is a hybrid construct contrary to the laws of traditional museum logic. In the version of the project presented at Garage, the artist brings into contact objects and images from East Asia, West Africa, and Europe. Their meeting place is also one of the meeting&rsquo;s participants: the propaganda kimono, an item of clothing which was particularly popular in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The traditional costume made from propaganda textiles was an immediate product of the modernization which gripped Japan in the first half of the twentieth century and directly related to war and colonial expansion, which militarist ideologists considered to be the basis of public prosperity. Judging by the military technology illustrated, it can be assumed that the event depicted on the kimono is the Battle of Khalkin Gol (1939) between Japan and the Soviet Union. Two incarnations of Japanese &ldquo;bombers&rdquo; can be found in The Fabric of Felicity: the bomber depicted in Feio&rsquo;s assemblage and the bomber jackets from Yuichiro Tamura&rsquo;s collection. In both works, the artists show how clothing becomes a screen onto which images born of colonial fantasy and political imagination are projected.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Carlos Noronha Feio

(b. 1955, Wiesbaden, Federal Republic of Germany; lives and works in London and Plouer-sur-Rance, France)
<img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D1%88%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD_01.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="922" />
La terreur n&rsquo;est autre chose que la justice prompte, s&eacute;v&egrave;re, inflexible, 2018 Installation In collaboration with Cl&eacute;mentine Bedos, Marie-Andr&eacute;e Bernard-Tr&eacute;bern, and Thomas Gaugain Courtesy of the artist
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The clothing historian Jennifer Craik believes that uniforms originate from the social need to identify the military and priests, to keep them apart from the masses. One might also say the opposite: once a group of people in any society sees itself as a collective moral authority and/or a supervisor of the public order, it comes up with a dress code, a kind of uniform. In her installation, which resembles a local history museum, the British artist Sharon Kivland allegorically narrates the French revolution through articles of clothing and accessories spontaneously adopted by the warring layers of society. Two foxes are dressed as sans-culottes, representatives of the lower classes who were the main supporters of revolutionary terror and its ideologist Maximilien Robespierre. (The costumes were made by the artist Cl&eacute;mentine Bedos.) Robespierre&rsquo;s famous justification for the guillotine&rsquo;s near non-stop deployment in 1792&ndash;1794 is the title of the installation. Sans-culottes wore pants as opposed to the knee-length stockings favored by the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. After the revolution, representatives of other classes sympathetic to the regime also began wearing pants, thus creating the first political uniform. The other foxes proffer items of clothing characteristic of the &ldquo;old order&rdquo; (sewn by the dressmaker Marie-Andr&eacute;e Bernard-Tr&eacute;bern) to a headless dummy sporting a jabot and lace (made by the artist Thomas Gauguin). The twelve deer wear red ribbons on their necks, as the participants of the &ldquo;victims&rsquo; balls&rdquo; allegedly did: these apocryphal events were sumptuous evening receptions for relatives of those guillotined.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Sharon Kivland

(b. 1977, Toyama, Japan; lives and works in Atami, Japan)
<img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D1%8E%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE-%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B01.jpg" alt="" width="1067" height="1600" />
Hey Daddy, Hey Brother, 2017 12 bomber jackets, dimensions variable Collection of KADIST
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The American bomber jacket with traditional Japanese embroidery is a product of the Korean War (1950&ndash;1953). Since 1910, Korea had been occupied by Japan. After the allies defeated Japan in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea into zones of influence, just like Germany. The revision of the border along the 38th parallel began with the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. In 1953, the conflict reached the cold phase that continues to this day. Bomber jackets with dragons and Mount Fuji were very popular with American soldiers stationed at military bases in Japan. After the withdrawal of the US armed forces, they became a fashion statement of the Japanese working class, and later of the yakuza, who appreciated the resemblance of the embroidery on leather to irezumi or full-body tattoos. The interpenetration of Japanese and American culture based on stylistic references to organized crime began with fashion designer Issey Miyake showing the collection &ldquo;Tattoo&rdquo; (1971) in New York. For &ldquo;Tattoo,&rdquo; Miyake created a print featuring the heroes of the &ldquo;summer of love&rdquo;&mdash;Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix&mdash;in a sinuous pattern reminiscent of irezumi. Yuichiro Tamura sees signs of the multi-layered identity of postwar Japan in the bomber jackets originally produced for the US military, which are known as sukajan (short for &ldquo;souvenir jacket&rdquo;). It reflects a class stratification that goes back to the feudal era (the first yakuza emerged from among small traders and regulars of illegal gambling establishments) and is also a textured collage of East and West characteristic of ever-increasing globalization.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Yuichiro Tamura

(b. 1984, Rostov-on-Don; lives and works in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed__F7A2001-Edit.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1218" />
Untitled (Dance), 2017 Digital print on paper, 118 x 157 cm Courtesy of the artist
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A multicolored air mattress, an oilcloth with a geometric pattern, brickwork, a hanging with a floral pattern: all of these make up a background for a male figure frozen in a bizarre pose. The man is wearing bright-yellow glasses, a t-shirt with a picture of ducks over a patterned long sleeve shirt, boxer shorts over tights with a Mondrian-style print, and two pairs of socks with holes in them, one on top of the other. This strange outfit, combining references to modernism, pop art, and a set of subcultures from punk and rasta to hip-hop, is complemented by dreadlocks and a nose ring. Even when it is represented by a single work that is not part of a series, Sapozhnikov&rsquo;s photographic practice gives the impression of being an agglomeration of things, textures, and styles. The contrasting colors, bright accents, and choreographic complexity of the pose suggest a baroque, southern Russian aesthetic. The view of the photographer&mdash;which cancels out the once significant difference between the figure and the background, the subject and the object, the organic and the geometrical&mdash;seems to reveal something characteristic of modern vision, that is, the historically constructed perception of contemporaneity. The rejection of cultural hierarchies and the work&rsquo;s performative virtuosity are just some of the signs of this contemporaneity of global multitudes, excessive information, swarming communication, ideological ruins, capitalist shells, the visual image of which is created by Sapozhnikov.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Sergey Sapozhnikov

(b. 1958, Washington, D.C.; lives and works in New York)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BB%D0%B8%20%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%81_01.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="922" />
Buried Treasure, 1994 Synthetic crushed velvet, photograph, dimensions variable Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica
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The dress-sculptures by the American artist Beverly Semmes are unwearable. They are clothes taking up the maximum of space: their deployment not only goes beyond everyday use but also beyond ritual. Semmes is aware of the hallucinatory potential of fabric as it seeks to escape from the control of social conventions and everyday consciousness. According to the artist, Buried Treasure is &ldquo;a map to nowhere, a map that serves no purpose.&rdquo; There is a hint, though: a small photograph of a figure in a black dress (perhaps the actual dress that became the sculpture) with a red X on its back. This is a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne&rsquo;s The Scarlet Letter, which tells the story of a female outsider forced to wear an embroidered A (for &ldquo;adulteress&rdquo;) on her clothing. Questioning the history of society&rsquo;s cruelty toward those who violate written and unwritten laws, Buried Treasure can instill gothic horror: after all, the owner of the dress is absent and/or has supernatural abilities (is this the buried treasure of the title?) to reach as far as she wants, to caress or strangle anyone she cares to.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Beverly Semmes

(b. 1963, Mbarara, Uganda; lives and works in London)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF18%20(1).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1067" />
Waiting, 2007 Single-screen video installation, 35mm color film, HD transfer with Dolby 5.1 surround sound, 7&rsquo; 45&rdquo; Courtesy Zarina Bhimji Studio and DACS
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Place and time are excluded from the frame. There are no people either, only hands, in passing. The camera focuses on the picturesque swinging threads of raw materials and the machines used for their processing. Walls, floors, and rooms are in view, focusing on details like knives, tables, and machinery used.
The white waves are sisal, reminiscent of European hair. The film was shot in three sisal-processing factories in Kenya, chosen for their architecture.
At the preliminary research stage, Bhimji was interested in the colonial economy and African workers&rsquo; unions and how there might be links between them, as well as the rise of African movements for independence. The process of research enabled her to find these locations and create the concept of work. Bhimji&rsquo;s process of creation sought to stage the architecture as a still life painting, offering emotional close-ups. The work is a consideration of new possibilities.
Originally shot in mute, with curiosity and discovery, various sounds were recorded separately by Bhimji and then incorporated in the last phase of production. Light, texture, and movement were central to the camerawork. Woven together to work on multiple levels, the sound and image are equally important in this piece. The work becomes about the painterly forms, textures, light, and shadows. Post-production, Bhimji worked with a grader to color the film. This piece was shot for her Turner Prize nomination in 2007.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Zarina Bhimji

(b. 1949, Arnhem, The Netherlands; lives and works in Amsterdam)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF19%20(14).jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1067" />
The Street &amp; Modern Life, 2015 Video film, 30&rsquo; Courtesy of the artist
The Dutch conceptual photographer Hans Eijkelboom has spent a quarter of a century photographing ordinary people in the shopping streets of the world capitals. New York, Paris, and Shanghai are almost indistinguishable through the lens of his camera, and the dizzying variety of mass-market clothing creates fascinating chains of analogies. Operating with huge volumes of photographic data, Eijkelboom carefully and ironically arranges it, creating a monumental encyclopedia of &ldquo;people of the twenty-first century,&rdquo; evidence of the visual abundance of the epoch of global capitalism, which extols difference yet is frighteningly monotonous, something which can be seen by the astute observer. Eijkelboom&rsquo;s response to classical street photography, which is obsessed with catching the right moment, is the serial method and his interest in the repeated, banal, and typical. At the beginning of his artistic career, Eijkelboom found fame with his triptych The Three Communists (1975), portraying himself as a Marxist, a Leninist, and a Maoist. Even then, his interest in clothing as a way of forming identity was apparent. A series of stopped moments, passing by like people in the street, suggests the indifferent nature of this detached photographic process, but also brings to mind a comparison of Eijkelboom&rsquo;s method with the humanistic approach of August Sander, the author of the photobook Face of Our Time, which was banned by the Nazis.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Hans Eijkelboom

Overproduction of fabric in an Indian epic
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Unknown artist Madhubani panel (Disrobing of Draupadi), Bihar, India, late 1970s&ndash;early 1980s Colorwash and ink on paper, 55.2 x 76.4 cm State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow
Unknown artist Tusk with scenes from the Mahabharata, India, 1970s Ivory and wood, height 119 cm State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow
Mahabharat, episode 47, &ldquo;Disrobing of Draupadi&rdquo; (excerpt), 1988&ndash;1990 Video, 6&rsquo; 2&rdquo; Directed by Ravi Chopra Courtesy of B.R.TV
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The Austrian Indologist Moriz Winternitz called the Indian epic Mahabharata &ldquo;a literary monster.&rdquo; A colossus of world literature, this Sanskrit legend interweaves countless subjects and images that define the cultural space of South Asia. One episode tells the story of Draupadi, the wife of five brother-princes who are involved in a bloody struggle with a kindred royal dynasty. The eldest of Draupadi&rsquo;s husbands loses his wealth, the kingdom, his brothers, and their shared spouse to a cunning opponent in a dice game. The villains drag Draupadi into a gambling hall by the hair and ruthlessly begin to tear off her clothes. Krishna heeds the victim&rsquo;s entreaties and turns into an infinite length of precious cloth to cover her: she remains undefiled. The sacred incident of the endless sari from an ancient epic can be interpreted as a metaphor for the current state of the textile industry in South Asia. There is one correction, however. The supreme power producing infinite fabric is no longer Krishna, but capitalism.
The Fabric of Felicity presents this dramatic plot using works on loan from the State Museum of Oriental Art&mdash;a carved elephant tusk and a Madhubani folk painting&mdash;and an excerpt from the popular Indian 94-episode adaptation of the Mahabharata, directed by Ravi Chopra.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

The Endless Sari

(since 2004, based in Stockholm)
Standard Length of a Miracle, with Jonas Hassen Khemiri (author), Tigran Avetisyan (costume designer), and Dmitry Konovalov, Sergey Strebkov, Alexey Sviridov (woodworkers), 2016&ndash;2018 Installation, dimensions variable Courtesy Michael Stor&aring;kers collection and the artists Originally produced for Tensta konsthall, Stockholm Garage would like to thank Apetta European Dry Cleaners and Volna Dry Cleaners (both St. Petersburg)
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Swedish duo Goldin+Senneby (Simon Goldin and Jacob Senneby) is known for its complex productions that include elements of literature, installation, and performance. The artists&rsquo; long-term project Headless links alchemy and modern financial markets. Standard Length of a Miracle is a dramatization of a story written specifically for this work by Jonas Khemiri, a descendant of migrants from Tunisia. Its protagonist is a migrant laborer in Stockholm who works at a dry cleaner while trying to find access to more privileged strata of society. He is attracted to art school students: in their manner of dressing he sees the highest manifestation of freedom and self-esteem. To pass an interview at an art center, the protagonist appropriates the Swedish name Anders Reutersw&auml;ld. From things left at the dry cleaner he creates several outfits that&nbsp;he believes resemble those worn by art world people. A social inversion occurs in which an outsider perceives the &ldquo;looks&rdquo; of the creative class as a uniform and not a sign of uniqueness. For each version of the work, Goldin+Senneby invite local fashion designers to cooperate and co-create Standard Length of a Miracle. In Moscow, their co-author was the fashion designer Tigran Avetisyan, who followed the protagonist&rsquo;s recipe and created a collection of clothes for Garage employees from things forgotten in dry cleaners in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Every day at exactly 14:12 for the duration of the exhibition, a Garage staff member will read aloud Jonas Khemiri&rsquo;s story.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Goldin+Senneby

(b. 1960, Gerolstein and 1961, Hamm, Federal Republic of Germany; live and work in Berlin)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF9.jpg" alt="" width="1143" height="1600" />
Working Proposal: Actualization of Chapter 15 / Capital Vol. 1 Part 4 by Marx, 2012 Digital print on paper, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists
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In the 1920s, sociologist Otto Neurath and artist Gerd Arntz developed the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (known as Isotype after 1935), a new way of acquainting the general public with ever-increasing volumes of information and the first infographics. Neurath and Arntz&rsquo;s main achievement was the atlas Society and Economics (1930) designed to systematize global industries, labor, and resources (for example, sugar production) using understandable graphs and schemes. Before the Nazis came to power in Austria, Neurath and Arntz regularly traveled to Moscow to advise the Izostat Institute, which had been founded based on their developments. Since the mid-1990s, the German artists Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann have been engaged in a gradual update of the information gathered for the atlas. Using the method of &ldquo;militant research,&rdquo; Creischer and Siekmann are not limited to pure statistics. In the case of Working Proposal, they compare the position of Indian textile workers during the Great Bombay Strike in 1982 with Italy&rsquo;s autumno caldo (hot fall) of 1969&ndash;1970, a series of strikes and boycotts involving around 1.5 million workers. The old and new &ldquo;graphic statistics&rdquo; reduce people to a uniform. But unlike the abstract pie charts and sectors in conventional infographics, isotype does not just present abstract data but mobilizes an active relationship with the processes concerned through identification with the social classes that are depicted.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann

(b. 1981, Brovary, USSR; lives and works in Kyiv)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF10%20(3).jpg" alt="" width="1067" height="1600" />
Second Hand, 2018 Tiles, concrete, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
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Specially created for The Fabric of Felicity, Zhanna Kadyrova&rsquo;s object continues her series Second Hand (2014&ndash;ongoing), which explores ex-Soviet ruins, including the Darnitsky silk factory and the Kyiv film-making factory. Working with ceramic tiles, which she has used previously, Kadyrova presents exaggerated simulations of clothing in architectural spaces, integrating her objects into the existing textures of old buildings. The tautological similarity of the material from which the objects are made to the background on which they appear produces an effect that Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie, estrangement. Architecture is likened to a living body and its wall covering to skin or clothing. Borrowing the notion of secondhand clothing, Kadyrova proposes a new, modern ethic, calling for a &ldquo;second hand&rdquo; to give the old world&rsquo;s things a &ldquo;second life,&rdquo; as opposed to the modernist and consumerist demand for novelty. This approach is shared by Garage, which is located in the former Vremena Goda caf&eacute;, which was built fifty years ago. When&nbsp;the building was reconstructed in 2015, the partially-preserved tiles of the semi-ruined building were intentionally not replaced. Some of the green tiles had fallen off the walls and these became the material for Kadyrova&rsquo;s new object. The example of Garage enables us to rethink the concept of secondhand not as bowing to necessity but as consciously opting for responsible and rational consumption.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Zhanna Kadyrova

(b. 1975, La Paz, Bolivia; lives and works in La Paz)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF13%20(1).jpg" alt="" width="1067" height="1600" />
From Harvard to Warisata, 2018, 2018 Photography, performance documentation, video, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
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The Bolivian artist Narda Alvarado works with the poetry of uniforms and casual wear. This project, created specifically for The Fabric of Felicity, was inspired by the Bolivian population&rsquo;s widespread habit of wearing second-hand clothing from the USA and Europe. As in any other second-hand clothing market, sweaters bearing American university logos are very common. Alvarado confronts the casualness of second-hand clothing with the history of education in Bolivia. To create her performance and video, the artist invited students from Warisata Teachers' Training School. In fact, the photograph on the podium was made against the school&acute;s facade. Warisata was one of the first indigenous productive schools, established in the Bolivian highlands between 1931 and 1940. It was founded by a Bolivian teacher of European descent and an Aymara educator, in close cooperation with students, parents, and locals. All decisions were made by the Warisata Council of Elders. &nbsp;In the 1930s, this was a radical educational project: at that time indigenous people were perceived only as servants and domestic workers and did not receive any education. The institution admitted (and currently admits) young&nbsp;Bolivian students from all over the country. As early as the 1960s, Warisata&rsquo;s practice influenced Brazilian Paolo Freire&rsquo;s theory of &ldquo;the pedagogy of the oppressed.&rdquo; For Alvarado, the interaction of American students&acute; uniform and the context of Bolivian education is not simply a paradox of the global circulation of clothing but an affirmation of the right to an alternative to great Western science.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Narda Alvarado

(b. 1931, Beirut, Lebanon; lives and works in Venice, USA)
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Tendresse (Dress #5), 1975 Thread on fabric, 137.1 x 48.2 x 30.5 cm
Mannequin #5, 1985 Wood, acrylic paint, foam, 185.4 x 48.2 x 30.5 cm
Mannequin #6, 1985 Wood, acrylic paint, foam, 185.4 x 48.2 x 30.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist
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Fabric can be understood as an almost abstract energy: it can be made into a new-born baby&rsquo;s swaddling clothes or a funeral shroud. Huguette Caland, the daughter of the first president of independent Lebanon, has been using the life-giving resource of clothing or its absence in her art since the 1960s. &ldquo;Erotic means life,&rdquo; Caland said in an interview with the Lebanese writer Hanan al-Sheikh. Unlike many of her countrywomen, the artist has always liked wearing long caftans that conceal the outlines of the body. In 1979, she even cooperated with the French couturier Pierre Cardin on a special series of dresses similar to these caftans for a line called Nour (which in Arabic means &ldquo;ray of light&rdquo;). This brings to mind Adolf Loos&rsquo; essay &ldquo;Why A Man Should Be Well-Dressed: Appearances Can Be Revealing,&rdquo; in which he discusses early twentieth-century fashion.
The Austrian theorist and practitioner of modernist architecture writes: &ldquo;Let the Chandala&mdash;an untouchable beggar&mdash;sport trousers of his special cut. The royal son wants to walk in the streets incognito.&rdquo; However, Caland chooses her outfits for other reasons: originally, because she was overweight in her youth, and now because she remembers the clothing of her youth fondly. The dress presented in The Fabric of Felicity is supposed to conceal the human form and its curves. Nevertheless, this &ldquo;birthday suit&rdquo; shows more than it hides. The artist&rsquo;s projections of nudity on the fabric&rsquo;s surface suggest that the naked body (albeit imaginary) is capable of transmitting identity at least as well as clothing.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Huguette Caland

(b. 1951 and 1945, Moscow; live and work in New York)
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Naked Dress, 1977 (printed 1994) Performance documentation, 5 photographs on cardboard, 53 х 197 х 3.5 cm State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
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In the unofficial Moscow art scene of the 1970s, partners and collaborators Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin became pioneers of performance&mdash;a medium that at that the time was experiencing a &ldquo;golden age&rdquo; worldwide. One of the basic expressive tools for many performance artists, from Carolee Schneemann to Marina Abramović, was the naked body, which was intended to create intimate contact with the viewer or shock with its constrained corporeality. In Soviet culture, however, the portrayal of nudity was a taboo subject and therefore the one performance that the Gerlovins did nude, Zoo &ndash; Homo Sapiens (1977), could have led to both the performers and the ten or so &ldquo;trusted&rdquo; viewers being charged with &ldquo;the production or marketing of pornographic material.&rdquo; The corporeality of Western performance was alien to Moscow conceptualism, so in Naked Dress (documentation of the performance Costumes) the artists portray Adam and Eve in the bosom of nature, although the conventionality of their game is emphasized by the sackcloth &ldquo;naked suits&rdquo; they wear, which have the contours of the male and female body painted on them. It remains a mystery what lies behind this artistic choice&mdash;the desire to depict radical separation from biblical paradise through the fall of the soul into the body or the suppressed sexuality of Russian conceptualism.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin

(1949, Detroit&ndash;1990, New York)
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Coat Hanger, 1980 Pigment print, 58.4 x 38.1 cm Courtesy of the Estate of Jimmy DeSana and Salon 94, New York
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The level of creativity in 1980s New York was comparable to that of Berlin in the 1920s. Another similarity is that the background for such daring experiments was an impending catastrophe: Nazism in Germany and the AIDS epidemic in the USA. President Ronald Reagan offered America&rsquo;s wealthiest citizens low taxes and supported ultra-conservative policies. As a result, American cities were increasingly split into zones inhabited by the poor and &ldquo;golden miles&rdquo; for the rich. New York responded by activating minorities and subcultures, as well as by a dramatic expansion in the art sphere, which included limitless admiration for the consumer society (Jeff Koons) and sophisticated aestheticism (Robert Mapplethorpe). During his lifetime, photographer Jimmy DeSana almost never exhibited his works and only published one book, although it included a preface by legendary beatnik William Burroughs. DeSana experimented&nbsp;with photography as well as with his own sexuality, complementing staged compositions with elements of sado-masochistic games. Unlike Mapplethorpe, DeSana often introduced irony and grotesque into his erotic pictures. Coat Hanger is probably the purest and the most concise example of his approach. According to the artist, female and male natures become aware of their differences through dress codes symbolized by a banal coat hanger. Here, nudity is understood as the paradisal innocence of the Old Testament and the coat hanger is a stand-in for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This image perfectly summarizes 1980s New York&rsquo;s state of constant disguise and transgression, even if only within the narrow framework of the bohemian carnival of identities.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Jimmy DeSana

(b. 1942, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia; lives and works in Budapest)
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Blackshave Poem (Performance in Young Artists Club, Budapest), 1979 Gelatin silver print, 8 parts, each 15 x 10.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and acb Gallery, Budapest
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Katalin Ladik, poet, artist, and performer, first emerged within a circle of avant-garde writers in the Yugoslav (now Serbian) city of Novi Sad. She began working actively in the 1970s, when the postwar generation of artists were posing the question of individual self-expression and sexuality in the socialist context. In the culture of the Communist bloc countries gender roles were determined by notions of the collective identity of working people. One&rsquo;s personal image was developed almost exclusively in a private way through individual tailoring and dressmakers&rsquo; studios.The naked body was perceived as both indecent and abstract, something which did not belong to the collective. Having gained notoriety with her nude appearances, Ladik aimed to restructure viewers&rsquo; expectations with a series of performances jointly known as Blackshave Poem. It is a reaction to reaction: having affirmed a sexuality that was independent of the collective, the artist refused it after she was faced with a purely consumer attitude to nudity. In these actions, under the layer of clothing there is another, black layer, which entirely covers the body, but repeats its contours. Lace lingerie retain a hint of the erotic, but the act of seduction is hampered by the fact that Ladik imitates shaving, not only of her body but also of her face. In Blackshave Poem the artist regains control over the objectification of the body, taking it beyond erotic demonstration.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Katalin Ladik

(b. 1955, Fresnillo, Mexico; lives and works in Mexico City)
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_FabF11%20(3).jpg" alt="" width="1067" height="1600" />
Naked miners strike in Pachuca, Mexico, 1985 Two photographs (exhibition prints), dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Cuartoscuro.com
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In 1985, gold miners in Pachuca&mdash;Real del Monte in Mexico came out on strike. They numbered 3,500 people, of whom more than fifty chose to undress in protest at the tough conditions of their work. In particular, the management company did not provide the miners with the necessary overalls and masks, leading to a high mortality rate. The miners had to filter dust through their scarves or flannel cloths in order to breathe. They told a reporter from La Jornada newspaper that their nudity symbolized their descent into the mine as being like going to hell, a direct reference to Christian iconography of the underworld, where sinners are always naked. The paradoxical nature of a naked strike for the right to receive work clothes had an effect, and many of the workers&rsquo; demands were met. For Pedro Valtierra, the famous Mexican documentary photographer (and a co-founder of La Jornada, where these pictures were first published), Gold Miners from Pachuca de Soto would&nbsp;become a signature work. In the context of the &ldquo;birthday suit&rdquo; theme in The Fabric of Felicity, this work is interesting for being a political rather than an artistic decision. Nudity here is a synonym for extreme poverty and honesty: the workers have nothing to conceal and nothing to lose.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Pedro Valtierra

(1927, Moscow&ndash;2008, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France)
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Palace, 1968 Appliqu&eacute; and oil on canvas, 110 х 98.5 cm Mark Kurtser collection
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As the art historian Viktor Tupitsyn observes, Lydia Masterkova&rsquo;s use of lace from her grandmother&rsquo;s trunk and brocade found in abandoned churches in her paintings from the late 1960s &ldquo;set the artist apart in the patriarchal world of Moscow&rsquo;s alternative art scene.&rdquo; Appliqu&eacute;s made from old fabric do not simply rebel against the male world and the hero myth in underground art. They also appeal to pre-revolutionary textures as a (spiritual) medium. Palace appears semi-abstract: in one of the fabric fragments one can recognize a gable; the vertical strips of textile resemble columns. In these works, Masterkova, who is often called a &ldquo;direct heir to the avant-garde,&rdquo; accesses intimate, feminine spaces and religious rituals, spheres that were not valued by the revolutionary vanguard. These spheres are buried under many layers of modernization and the ruins of World War II. They can be only be uncovered through abstraction as a form of &ldquo;spirit-seeing&rdquo; or &ldquo;spirit-seeking.&rdquo; On the back of Palace Masterkova wrote a markedly symbolist poem addressed to a friend named Shadow, including a play on her family name (Masterkova sounds like &ldquo;masteritsa,&rdquo; the female form of &ldquo;master,&rdquo; as in &ldquo;master of her craft&rdquo;):
The skillful Mistress will create a worthy Palace &ndash; where our meetings still live on, as shades or shallows.
The title is reminiscent of another artwork that addressed the sacred past via abstraction, passing the avant-garde and modernization by: Jackson Pollock&rsquo;s Cathedral.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Lydia Masterkova

(b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic; lives and works in New York)
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Ciguapa Pantera (to all the goods and pleasures of this world), 2015 Acrylic and ink on paper, 241.3 x 165.1 cm Courtesy Tiroche DeLeon Collection and Art Vantage PCC Ltd.
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The Ciguapa is a mythological creature from the folklore of the Dominican Republic, where Firelei B&aacute;ez was born. It is portrayed (and remembered by those who saw it) as a woman of dazzling beauty with long hair. The Ciguapa lives in the forest and only comes out to lure a new victim into its impenetrable lair and devour them. B&aacute;ez, who has lived in New York since childhood, uses the Ciguapa&rsquo;s image to trigger memories of the country she left and a dialogue with her ancestors. For Dominicans and other people from the Caribbean, emigration to the USA poses the question of their place in the melting pot of cultures. In America, they are by default perceived as black, although they do not consider themselves as such: the Dominican Republic recognizes many shades of identity that go beyond the segregation convenient for the dominant race. In&nbsp;B&aacute;ez&rsquo;s painting, the Ciguapa is an ancient deity, whose strength is determined by its proximity to the chthonic power of nature rather than its skin color or hair type. With her anthropomorphic silhouette, this hybrid of fauna and flora combines everything that the ordinary mind sees as symbols of irrationality with a hint of threat: the thickness of the earth where dead bodies and treasures are buried, tropical plants (which hide poisonous snakes and predators), and overt female sexuality (B&aacute;ez&rsquo;s Ciguapa wears high heels).
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Firelei Báez

&nbsp;(b. 1971, Stockholm, Sweden; lives and works in Stockholm)
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Bella Rune app for the exhibition The Fabric of Felicity, 2018 App for smartphones with ARCore support, textile, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
Augmented reality is rarely used to show the other side of things, to endow them with a will that is dormant in ordinary reality. Bella Rune, a professor at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm, uses a special application to reveal the demonic plans of textile ornament. The repeating pattern is by no means neutral: the artist became convinced of this during her exploratory trip to Ivanovo, the center of the Russian and Soviet textile industry. Using motifs of industrialization and early Soviet slogans, fabric designs by local artists made in the 1920s and early 1930s continued the struggle for the hegemony of the proletariat. Ornament can only be suspended by a cut, but never destroyed: the app reacts to various triggers&mdash;from the architecture of Garage to specially-created uniforms and scarves&mdash;by creating a flood of patterns. Avant-garde and propaganda ornament lost the race for universality to paisley, which came into existence several centuries earlier and is still reproduced by the textile factories of the Ivanovo region. The secret of the teardrop-shaped motif&rsquo;s success, which Russians call &ldquo;cucumber,&rdquo; is possibly in its &ldquo;biologicalness:&rdquo; tears, cucumbers, and human beings are mainly water. Plus, the outline of the ornament resembles an early-stage mammalian embryo. The paisley pattern reflects the total employment of humankind in the factory of life.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Bella Rune

(b. 1981, Baghdad; lives and works in Los Angeles)
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Targets, 2017 Oil on linen, 185.6 x 243.7 x 5.4 cm Courtesy Ani Arnold collection
Mnemonic Artifact 5, 2017 Oil on linen, 243.8 x 185.1 x 5.2 cm Private collection
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In her works, Hayv Kahraman addresses the themes of memory, trauma, and the search for identity. Saddam Hussein&rsquo;s totalitarian regime and the intervention of the US Armed Forces during the Gulf War (1990&ndash;1991) forced the artist&rsquo;s family to flee Iraq for Sweden when Hayv was eleven years old. Her works are invariably inhabited by ghostly female look-alikes, wandering in a soft canvas void. In Kahraman&rsquo;s paintings, fabric and clothing operate as symbols of protest against cultural and public diktats. Firstly, they represent a mutiny against European power over the world or, to be more exact, the supremacy of the pictorial protocols of Renaissance painting. Islamic geometric ornament, which is incorporated in the depiction of the cloak, violates the two-dimensional perception of spatial forms and resists perspective, which is often considered the greatest achievement of Western visual culture. What have historically been canonical works of European art lose their uniqueness and become &ldquo;provincialized&rdquo; when passed through the filters of Arab miniatures, Persian painting, and Japanese woodcuts. The second point of protest is the absence of the hijab and, in general, of any clothing: a negative device abolishing the patriarchal norms of Sharia law and ultimately giving the artist control over the representation of her body. In many ways, Kahraman&rsquo;s paintings resemble weaving: she cuts linen canvases, re-assembling pieces of fabric in zigzag patterns reminiscent of an Iraqi hand fan.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Hayv Kahraman

(b. 1985, Juru, Zimbabwe; lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe)
In One Accord, 2018 Oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 206 x 213 cm Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
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The huge canvases by Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera are a reminder of eclectic early expressionism, with its characteristic quoting of sacred images that belong to other eras and geographies. Her new series of paintings, which includes In One Accord, was created during a recent residency in Bangalore. The name of the painting is from the Bible (&ldquo;At the onset of the day of Pentecost, they were in one accord,&rdquo; Acts 2:1). This passage describes the moment when the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles. Through the emergence of &ldquo;separating flame-like tongues,&rdquo; Christ&rsquo;s disciples were gifted the ability to speak any language of the world in order to bear the Word of God. This artwork does not feature tongues in the sense of &ldquo;language.&rdquo; Instead, it collides and interprets two mythological systems, from India and Zimbabwe. In India, cows are sacred: they&nbsp;personify the goddess Bhūmi, who gives life and happiness. In Zimbabwe, any animal that appears in a dream is interpreted as an evil spirit trying to break through to real life. Zvavahera usually transfers images from nightmares onto her canvas, but in the case of In One Accord she finds a balance between the supernatural role of a single animal in very different cultures. Textiles and ornament are structural elements of her paintings, allowing the eye to fix on the rhythmic basis of the composition. However, they also conceal the painful details of the dream and divide up images that are too threatening or tragic in order to prevent their direct impact on the viewer.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Portia Zvavahera

(b. 1982, Moscow; lives and works in Moscow)
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Skirts, 2011 Acrylic paste and acrylic on canvas, 7 parts, each 60 x 60 cm Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation
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The geometric forms evenly filled with one color, the white background, and the square format clearly point to the historical prototype of Alexandra Galkina&rsquo;s series Skirts. It is, of course, Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, probably the most cited work in the history of twentieth-century art. Working with this recognizable icon of the avant-garde and modernism, Galkina radically alters the painting by contextualizing it within a world traditionally regarded as feminine: the world of fashionable outfits and an exclusively feminine piece of clothing. Playing with the idea that women must be interested in needlework is especially witty considering that Malevich himself&mdash;a male artist and one of the pillars of the modern mythology of genius&mdash;was fascinated by suprematist design. One might recall his sketches of ornament for fabrics (1919) or the suprematist dress projects (1923). Moreover, in his autobiography Malevich mentions that, as a child, he learned the arts of embroidering and lacemaking from his mother and that he enjoyed embroidering and crocheting. If, in this context, the combination of suprematist abstract painting with the world of cutting and sewing no longer seems paradoxical, one might consider the the signifying nature of the abstract image in Galkina&rsquo;s work, which &ldquo;reminds&rdquo; us of the prototype of the real thing on which it is based. With her trapezoidal skirts, based on the organic nature of the human body, Galkina reveals a universal abstract form while ironically using the history of art as an instruction. Her Skirts are equally distant from the avant-garde project of refiguring the everyday and from the interest in handicrafts often assigned to women&rsquo;s art. Being proportional to real mini skirts, these abstract forms play on the the human size of the artist and/or the viewer, translating modernist abstraction into &ldquo;human&rdquo; language.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Alexandra Galkina

(1923 Newburgh, USA&ndash;2015, Spencertown, USA)
Sketches and works on paper, 1960s Published in Artforum, October 1996 Private collection
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In her book Couture Culture, fashion historian Nancy Troy notes that the idea of the ready-made, which was revolutionary for art, was conceived by Marcel Duchamp in America. Duchamp, creator of the famous Fountain, was inspired by ready-made clothing stores&mdash;a new phenomenon for capitalism&mdash;and incorporated the practice of demonstrating and selling factory-made objects into his art. Troy emphasizes that this was more of a realistic sketch of the mass culture of everyday life than a Kantian or Hegelian philosophical insight. In light of this interpretation, Duchamp&rsquo;s art is not so far from the still life paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin or Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. A pioneer of postwar geometric abstraction, Ellsworth Kelly also took his initial impulse from everyday life. These archival documents show how he drew general outlines of the skirts, shirts, and trousers of ordinary&nbsp;passers-by in search of a complete expressive form. &ldquo;Everything I saw became something to be made, with nothing added,&rdquo; Kelly wrote in his diary in 1969. &ldquo;It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already-made.&rdquo; From Kelly&rsquo;s paintings we can &ldquo;retrieve&rdquo; sewing patterns, and through them the connection to clothing as such, independent of marketing tricks and runways.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Ellsworth Kelly

(1927, Rio de Janeiro&ndash;2004, Rio de Janeiro)
Divisor, 1968&nbsp; Performance documentation (September 29, 2018) Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser &amp; Wirth
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Unlike the constructivists and the Latin American representatives of concrete art that followed them, the neoconcretism movement sought to return subjectivity, emotionality, and sensuality to geometric abstraction. Hence their attempts to represent complex human realities with simple colors and forms. An important artist of the postwar Brazilian avantgarde, Lygia Pape experienced her country in times of great historical contrasts: the futurist aspirations symbolized by the new capital, Niemeyer&rsquo;s Brasilia, were destroyed by a military coup and a dictatorship which lasted two decades (1964&ndash;1985). In 1967, on the eve of the abolition of an already authoritarian constitution, Pape invited children from the favelas to walk the streets of Rio de Janeiro in a procession. The artist covered the children with a huge white cloth, the slits in which divided the crowd into single faces. Anyone could join the &ldquo;carnival of the disenfranchised.&rdquo; Divisor offered an opportunity to withdraw from the public space strictly regulated by the junta and into a zone of creative autonomy, albeit for a short while. This &ldquo;social sculpture&rdquo; made from white cloth and dedicated to human freedoms can rightly be considered part of the worldwide movement against oppression and inequality.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Lygia Pape

(1893, Florence&ndash;1959, Marina di Pietrasanta, Italy)
Thayaht dressed in a Tuta, 1920 Photo: P. Salvini, Florence (exhibition copy) &copy; Prato Textile Museum
How to cut out the Tuta, 1920 Tempera and ink on paper (reproduction) Galleria del Costume, Florence Courtesy Associazione Thayaht e RAM, Florence&nbsp;
The cut of the Tuta, model with straight lines by Thayaht. Published in the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, June 19, 1920 (reproduction) Galleria del Costume, Florence Courtesy Associazione Thayaht e RAM, Florence&nbsp;
Thayaht dressed in a Bituta, 1921 Photo: P. Salvini, Florence (exhibition copy) Courtesy Associazione Thayaht e RAM, Florence
Most of the works presented in the exhibition were created at the beginning of this century. Some, however, belong to earlier historical periods: the 1960s (Yoko Ono, Lygia Pape), the&nbsp;1970s (Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, Katalin Ladik), the 1980s (Jimmy DeSana), and the 1990s (Beverly Semmes). In breach of traditional exhibition logic, our narrative performs a loop-the-loop, turning toward the historical avant-garde. After all, according to the theoretician Peter B&uuml;rger, &ldquo;a contemporary artist can neither fully adopt nor fully abandon [their] discoveries.&rdquo; In the context of The Fabric of Felicity, this material is interesting primarily because of its borderline character: proclaiming themselves to be the &ldquo;vanguard&rdquo; (that is, an advancе formation), artists play the role of partisans making sorties into alien territories such as fashion, everyday life, and industrial production. After World War I this process, which had been barely noticeable earlier, was almost simultaneously taken up by art innovators across Europe and found one of its most striking incarnations in Soviet Russia.
During the hot summer of 1919, in a postwar Italy racked by mass poverty and shortages, the artist and sculptor Ernesto Michahelles (who used the palindromic pseudonym Thayaht) collaborated with his brother Ruggiero Alfredo Michahelles (RAM) on the first-ever all-in-one overalls for men and women. Thayaht called his new garment the Tuta, and this neologism entered the Italian dictionary. By adding one more &ldquo;t&rdquo; to the word&mdash;perhaps the T-shape of the tuta itself?&mdash;it becomes the Italian tutta, meaning all, the whole, a unified thing. The designer wanted it to be suitable for every situation and, more importantly, affordable for all. The Tuta could be cut with minimal wastage of fabric and it was easy to sew. In the summer of 1920, the instructions for cutting and sewing the Tuta were published: not in a fashion magazine, but on the pages of the most widely read Florentine newspaper, La Nazione. In its logical use of a single piece of fabric and the fact that it clothed the entire body, the Tuta was the quintessence of rationalism and totality. In photographs Thayaht can be seen demonstrating the Tuta (and the Bituta, a two-part version he went on to develop in 1921) with emphatic elegance. The overall&lsquo;s simplicity and versatility were in opposition to the haute couture of the time, which relied on hand finishing and individual fitting. Nevertheless, the Tuta is now an important part of fashion history.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles)

(1889, Krasnovidovo, Russian Empire&ndash;1924, Moscow))
Production Clothing for Actor No. 3, 1921 Paper, gouache, ink, collage, and varnish on paper, 33 &times; 25.3 cm State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (exhibited September&ndash;November)
Production Clothing for Actor No. 5, 1921 Colored wax pencils and graphite on paper, 35.6 &times; 30.7 cm State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (exhibited December&ndash;January)
While the Tuta aimed to be a universal product&mdash;equally suitable for men, women, and children, for everyday and evening wear&mdash;Russian constructivist artists from the group LEF (Left Front of the Arts) designed clothes based on their function. As labor played a key role in the new ideology, work clothes (such as overalls) were crucial: their form was dictated by the specifics of the professions. The first example of such work apparel was the prozodezhda (production clothing) for actors created by Liubov Popova when she worked with Vsevolod Meyerhold. It was inspired by Meyerhold&lsquo;s concept of biomechanics, in which the actor&rsquo;s body was regarded as a machine whose movements must be calculated and honed in order to pre-program the effect it would have on the audience.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Liubov Popova

(1891, St. Petersburg&ndash;1956, Moscow)
Alexander Rodchenko wearing a work overall based on his 1922 sketch and sewn by Varvara Stepanova Photo: Mikhail Kaufman, 1922&ndash;1923 (exhibition copy) Courtesy Alexander Lavrentiev
Created two years after the Italian Tuta, Alexander Rodchenko&lsquo;s work overalls manifest a new understanding of the figure of the artist. According to the theory of productivism, the artist was no longer an outcast genius, but a qualified specialist, a participant in the overall construction of the new society and the new way of life. The artist&rsquo;s means of production were now the pencil, ruler, and compasses (for which special pockets are provided in the overall), rather than a canvas and palette. With the help of these tools, the artist would design a new reality and, if necessary, subject the shape of the human body to geometric stylization. Unlike the Tuta, which was designed to be sewn from the cheapest cotton or hemp, the experimental model created for Rodchenko by his wife, Varvara Stepanova, used woolen fabric and leather trimmings on the collar and pocket openings in order to make the overall more durable. As a result of the industrial crisis there was no opportunity for mass production and the constructivist overalls remained experimental. The prototype remained a &ldquo;comrade object&rdquo; rather than a &ldquo;commodity object.&rdquo;
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Alexander Rodchenko

(1894, Kovno, Russian Empire&ndash;1958, Moscow)
Sportswear design, 1923&nbsp; India ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm Private collection, Moscow
Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodchenko&lsquo;s wife and companion, theorized about work clothes in the magazine LEF, the publication of the constructivists and productivists. In her article &ldquo;Today&rsquo;s Fashion is the Worker&rsquo;s Overall,&rdquo; she presented clothes as a machine whose material design must be appropriate for the nature of the particular work. She argued for the mass clothing industry as superior to the individual work of a tailor: open industrial stitching (instead of closed personal stitches) must reveal the sewing and cutting method, &ldquo;just as clearly visible as the parts of a machine.&rdquo; The variety of modern work clothes&mdash;from high-visibility vests for road workers to space suits&mdash;still reflects Stepanova&rsquo;s thoughts on the variety of production clothing. However, it was not working clothes that Stepanova chose to illustrate her article but sportswear. Her fantasy was driven by the emblems and colored elements used to distinguish the costumes of opposing teams. Class and gender differences in clothing were replaced by the practical consideration of differentiation in sports.&nbsp;
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Varvara Stepanova

(1885, Moscow&ndash;1953, Moscow)
Normal clothing research. Montage for the magazine New Life, 1924 (reproduction) Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, Moscow&nbsp;
In parallel with the development of specialized clothing taking place within the LEF circle, the founder of constructivism, Vladimir Tatlin&mdash;then head of the Department of Material Culture at GINHUK, the State Institute for Artistic Culture&mdash;was investigating universal everyday wear. Convenient and non-constraining, this all-season &ldquo;normal clothing&rdquo; rejected the vagaries of both&nbsp;fashion and the market mechanisms that had been revived with the introduction of the New Economic Policy. For instance, a design for a coat included removable autumn and winter linings. In rationalizing the process of making clothes, Tatlin simplified the cut as much as possible and tested the prototypes&rsquo; comfort and durability himself. Unlike Thayaht&rsquo;s patterns, the publication of &ldquo;normal clothing&rdquo; in the magazine Novy Byt (New Everyday Life) had only limited success as an instruction to spread democratic and functional design. But such publications did lay the foundation for Soviet DIY culture: the independent production, alteration, and adaptation of the many items that unavailable in shops.&nbsp;
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Vladimir Tatlin

(b. 1974, Thakurgaon, Bangladesh; lives and works in Dhaka and Thakurgaon)
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Haven is Elsewhere, 2017&ndash;оngoing Mixed media, dimensions variable Сourtesy of the artist, partially commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation
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Kamruzzaman Shadhin is known in Bangladesh not only for his art but also for working with indigenous people in the Thakurgaon District in the north of the country. In 2011, he created the Gidree Bawlee Foundation: gidree bawlee means &ldquo;lullaby&rdquo; in Santali, a rare South Asian language spoken in the local villages. The foundation brings Bangladeshi and international artists to Thakurgaon and introduces them to local practices, be they agricultural, religious or cultural. Haven is Elsewhere was created by Shadhin as the result of a large-scale action: a year and a half spent exchanging the clothes of refugees, including Rohingya people (Muslims fleeing Myanmar), for new clothes. The refugees&rsquo; clothes were turned into a huge piece of fabric decorated with traditional Bangladeshi kantha embroidery. There are many kinds of kantha: for festive clothing, tablecloths, vanity bags, covers of the Koran. The embroidery turns into a language that structures different aspects of everyday life. Its main task, though, regardless of application, is the ritual stitching together of fragmentary and incomprehensible experience in an uncontrollable world. Shadhin&rsquo;s installation turns old clothes into a monument to a humanitarian and political catastrophe. In this, Haven is Elsewhere has much in common with the works of the French artist Christian Boltanski, which are dedicated to the victims of Nazism.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Kamruzzaman Shadhin

Liubov Popova, Fabric designs, 1923&ndash;1924 Gouache on paper, 21 &times; 17.5 cm (exhibited September&ndash;November); 13.4 x 10 cm; 13.4 x 10.2 cm (exhibited December&ndash;January) Private collection, Moscow
Varvara Stepanova, Fabric design, 1924 Gouache on paper, 19.4 x 34.7 cm Private collection, Moscow
Fabric sample, 1924 Copy made in 1990 Private collection, Moscow
Varvara Stepanova at her desk in a dress made from fabric designed by Liubov Popova, 1924 Photo: Alexander Rodchenko (exhibition copy) Courtesy Alexander Lavrentiev
Varvara Stepanova in a robe made from fabric of her own design, 1924 Photo: Alexander Rodchenko (exhibition copy) Courtesy Alexander Lavrentiev
The concept of productivism was successfully implemented at the First State Textile Printing Factory in Moscow. Responding to factory director Alexander Arkhangelsky&rsquo;s invitation, which had been published in Pravda, constructivists came to work at the factory in order to provide new print designs for Soviet industry. In the article &ldquo;From Picture to Calico,&rdquo; the LEF theoretician Osip Brik wrote that &ldquo;calico, and work on it, are now the peaks of artistic labor.&rdquo; Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova were particularly productive, with around twenty geometric designs by each artist selected to go into production. Popova said that she experienced immense satisfaction at the sight of a village woman buying a piece of cloth of the artist&rsquo;s design in order to sew herself a dress. Although Stepanova was later critical of the application of decoration to finished fabric, the two artists discovered unlimited creative potential within a minimal set of artistic means. Their drawings made up of straight and circular lines and two or three flat colors resemble later minimalist and op art experiments.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

From Picture to Calico

(1885, Gradizhsk, Russian Empire&ndash;1979, Paris)
Sketch of a man&rsquo;s suit for a fashion house, 1925 Watercolor on paper, 42 &times; 27 cm Boris and Marina Molchanov collection, Moscow
Sonia Delaunay and two friends in Robert Delaunay&rsquo;s studio, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris, 1924 Photograph (exhibition copy) Biblioth&egrave;que nationale de France, Paris
In 1924, when Liubov Popova died tragically in Moscow, and Varvara Stepanova&rsquo;s work at the First State Textile Printing Factory had almost come to an end, the French artist of Ukrainian descent Sonia Delaunay opened the Atelier Simultan&eacute; in Paris, her own studio for producing fabrics with her designs. The atelier operated until 1934, producing textiles using the traditional method of hand block printing. In contrast to the floral motifs that dominated the decorative arts of those years, Delaunay used geometric ornament, but unlike the constructivists, she rarely used a ruler and compasses, which meant that her drawings, with their picturesque, carefree, and pulsating contours retained her individual signature, and when they were transferred by hand to the fabric, this effect only increased. As in the paintings of her husband, Robert Delaunay, the geometric elements in Sonia&rsquo;s fabrics served only as a means of distributing color in order to achieve the effect of contrast. In dressing the small circle of the intellectual elite in Paris, Delaunay satisfied both the taste for luxury and artisanal products and&mdash;with her shockingly bold and extravagant dresses&mdash;asserted the principles of abstract art. As a result, the scale of her business was more modest than that of Coco Chanel.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Sonia Delaunay

(1897, Munich&ndash;1983, Zurich)
G&uuml;nta St&ouml;lzl, Easter 1929 Photograph (exhibition copy) Courtesy Monika Stadler and Yael Aloni
Cards with samples of fabrics made by G&uuml;nta St&ouml;lzl, 1930s Fabric and paper, 26.5 &times; 18 cm and 27.8 &times; 20 cm Courtesy Monika Stadler and Yael Aloni
Kitty van der Mijll Dekker on a weaving loom at the Bauhaus Dessau, 1932 Photo: Senta Goerke, Bauhaus (exhibition copy) TextielMuseum, Tilburg
In her 1928 article &ldquo;From a Suit to a Drawing and Fabric,&rdquo; Varvara Stepanova dreamed that the artist&rsquo;s work in the textile industry would not consist of &ldquo;applying decorative patterns to finished fabric,&rdquo; but of inventing new ways of coloring and processing fabrics and introducing new materials. An experiment of this type was done in the laboratory conditions of the Bauhaus Dessau, when in 1926 G&uuml;nta St&ouml;lzl became head of the weaving workshop and the school&rsquo;s first female professor. At the core of textile practices at the Bauhaus, which were largely the domain of female artists working manually on looms, there was also abstract ornament, however they were not printed (either using metal rollers on cheap cotton or wooden blocks on expensive silk) but woven using multi-colored threads. The Bauhaus fabrics were conceived as prototypes for industrial production and, as with the constructivist textiles, they were designed to meet the requirements of functionality and utilitarianism. That notwithstanding, the &ldquo;women&rsquo;s department,&rdquo; as St&ouml;lzl called her workshop,&nbsp;was inspired by traditional Peruvian textiles and introduced new materials, in particular sound-absorbing and light-reflecting fabrics. In 1931, two years before the Bauhaus was shut down by the Nazis, G&uuml;nta St&ouml;lzl, as the wife of a Jew (the architect Arieh Sharon), was dismissed and forced to emigrate to Switzerland, where she continued to weave.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Günta Stölzl

Archive materials from the Soviet press, 1930&ndash;1950s
With the introduction of industrialization in the Soviet Union, the mass transformation of peasants and craftspeople into the working class was accompanied by the need to resolve hundreds of practical questions, which were very different from the constructivist task of designing the &ldquo;new man.&rdquo; In exchange for the centralized supply of goods, fixed working hours, and relative freedom from &ldquo;kitchen slavery,&rdquo; women were supposed to forgo political autonomy and to share the ideological goals of the state. Magazines aimed at the working class were a tool of political information, showcasing improvements in everyday life. Domestic policy was conceived as a series of campaigns aimed at reaching particular targets: tons of cotton, number of communist party members, literacy level, number of future male and female workers. Despite the widespread belief that everyday needs were outside the scope of planning in Stalin&rsquo;s Soviet Union, archive sources show that from the 1930s through the 1950s there were numerous calls to increase production of consumer goods. Numerous methods were proposed, from industrial technologies to do-it-yourself initiatives such as using fabric scraps for sewing and &ldquo;remaking&rdquo; other items of clothing. The introduction in 1930 of criminal liability for the theft and resale of work garments shows that the situation in the uniform sector was no better. And the lack of women&rsquo;s magazines, most of which had been closed down at end of the previous decade, removed the issue of clothing inequality and canceled out the search for identity beyond everyday clothing, which was the same for everyone. The female worker was not an object of desire and this offered some protection from sexual harassment, a subject which many pages of the magazine Female Worker (Rabotnitsa) were devoted to. Instead of the equality offered by the theorists of universal workwear, the era of industrialization divided Soviet society into a managing elite with access to individual tailoring and the working masses who invented ways to recirculate clothing and fabrics.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Forming the Soviet Female Worker

(1995&ndash;2014, St. Petersburg, Russia)
Triumph of Fragility, 2002 Video, 5&rsquo; 3&rdquo; Courtesy of the artists and Galerie AKINCI, Amst
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The first women&rsquo;s art group in the post-Soviet space, Factory of Found Clothes was founded by Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (a.k.a. Gluklya) and Olga Egorova (a.k.a. Tsaplya) in the mid-1990s and aimed to turn clothing into an art medium. The dresses, shirts, and coats created by the group&rsquo;s participants ranged from sentimental and tender to surreal and frightening. They told stories of romantic love, confessed their sins, and exposed their imaginary proprietresses. Their surfaces displayed drawings of internal organs, drops of blood made from glass beads, and intimate confessions written in a childlike hand. In their manifesto of 2002, the artists promised &ldquo;to protect the child in each of us&rdquo; and argued that &ldquo;the artist&rsquo;s place is on the side of the weak,&rdquo; paving the way for the collective and participatory practices of the &ldquo;utopian unions&rdquo; of the 2000s. Dressed in white, angelically asexual chemical protection suits, the lyrical heroines of Factory of Found Clothes had developed from schoolgirls into sisters of mercy, claiming for art the potential for helping people and taking the side of the oppressed. The performance Triumph of Fragility, in which students of a naval college marched through St. Petersburg in formation carrying miniature snow-white dressesin their hands, became the group&rsquo;s artistic manifesto. Rejecting the imposed stereotypes of male power and feminine weakness and revealing the child inside the uniformed military cadets, the artists undermined the unshakable power- and authority-driven hierarchies in Russian society.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Factory of Found Clothes

(b. 1973 and 1972, Moscow; live and work in Moscow)
Long Live the Art of Tatlin!, 2000/2018 Video, 4&rsquo; 44&rdquo; Courtesy of the artists&nbsp;
Concept: Ksenia Peretrukhina Reconstruction of costumes: Shifra Kazhdan Participants: Alexandra Arakelova, Marcel Vaessen, Thalia Verkade, Valentin Diaconov, Andrei Kiyanitsa, Ekaterina Koryukina, Aleksei Lobanov, Alexander Radzievsky, Polina Tarshis, Sergei Shcherbakov Camera operators: Viktor Durandin, Andrei Kirillov, Irina Malikova Photographers: Timur Bagov, Oleg Shagapov
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Around the time Factory of Found Clothes began dressing in white chemical protective suits, the art communities of Moscow and St. Petersburg were introduced to another white-clothed phenomenon: Shifra Kazhdan&rsquo;s paper suits that existed somewhere between art, theater, and alternative fashion. One of their most memorable appearances was in Long Live the Art of Tatlin!, a performance directed by Ksenia Peretrukhina that took place in St. Petersburg on September, 23 and 24, 2000. Performers dressed in Kazhdan&rsquo;s paper reconstructions of Vladimir Tatlin&rsquo;s normal-odezhda, or &ldquo;normal clothing,&rdquo; strolled across rooftops, stared into the distance, and marched across Palace Square with a sign that read &ldquo;Tatlin.&rdquo; Following on from the paper architecture of the 1980s, Kazhdan&rsquo;s paper clothing was an artistic and emotional homage to 1920s constructivism and hinted at the ephemeral nature of avant-garde utopias, in particular Tatlin&rsquo;s utopian dream of putting an end to fashion and providing the masses with comfortable and functional clothing. A film documenting the performance was screened on Russian television as part of the program Genius and Villain: Vladimir Tatlin. A newly edited version has been created by the artists for The Fabric of Felicity.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Shifra Kazhdan and Ksenia Peretrukhina

(b. 1971, Istanbul; lives and works in Istanbul)
Obstructions / Jean Factory, 2008 Single-channel video, 12&rsquo; Courtesy of the artist and Francesca Minini, Milan
Ali Kazma&rsquo;s documentary series Obstructions, of which Jean Factory is part, continues the study of labor the artist began in 2005 with an experiment performed in a public space. For Istanbul Pedestrian Exhibition 2, T&uuml;nel-Karak&ouml;y (2005), Kazma filmed local shopkeepers and artisans at work for thirty-seven days, and at the end of each working day he projected the resulting film onto the facade of a local building. After this observation marathon his interest in labor evolved into a series of films about professions, both skilled (neurosurgeon, cook) and low-paid (including partly-automated jeans sewing at a Turkish factory). Kazma sees any work as overcoming obstructions of varying complexity and does his best to show the variety of mental and physical operations involved in each profession. Similar attention spans equate doctors and factory workers, a watchmaker and a painter. In Kazma&rsquo;s films one can see a hidden polemic with theSoviet productionist artists of the 1920s. From the artist&rsquo;s point of view, the productionist slogan &ldquo;Labor will rule the world!&rdquo; is redundant: labor already rules the world, replacing chaos with order millimeter by millimeter. At the same time, Jean Factory is also an act of solidarity with workers. The film establishes a direct connection between those who make clothes and those who wear them, joining the viewer&rsquo;s leisure time and the factory working shift in a single flow.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Ali Kazma

(b. 1974, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka)
Rana Plaza, 2013&ndash;2018 Archival inkjet prints (exhibition copies), dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
Taslima Akhter&rsquo;s 2013 photo Final Embrace directed the attention of the mass media to working conditions in South Asian sweatshops. It was awarded third place at the World Press Photo competition and named one of the ten most important photos of the year by Time magazine. Unlike many professional photographers, Akhter participates in the struggle of those she photographs. She is the president of the political movement Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity and has been involved in the fight for workers&rsquo; rights since the mid-2000s, through media publications and the organization of rallies and protests. Work in such factories is a difficult and poorly paid. The minimum wage is 5,300 taka per month, around 4,000 rubles. For many women this is the only alternative to domestic work, and there is no implication of weekends or free time. Final Embrace is tragic evidence of a structural crisis in textile production. The photo was made on April 24, 2013, after the collapse of a building in which four floors were occupied by workshops producing fast fashion items for European brands and retailers (Benetton, Mango, El Corte Ingles, and others). Managers urged the workers to stay at work and threatened them with dismissal even after a crack opened up in the building, which was not constructed to withstand the vibrations of the heavy machines. The owner of the factory, Sohel Rana, is close to the ruling party of Bangladesh. He is currently in prison for submitting a false tax return. The trial date for the disaster at Rana Plaza has not yet been set. One of Akhter&rsquo;s goals is to keep alive the memory of the collapse, which claimed the lives of 1,134 people. In her most recent photos, one can see a canvas with portraits of victims embroidered by their relatives. This canvas was shown in 2018, the fifth anniversary of the disaster, on the square in front of Rana Plaza. Thanks to Akhter, a policy of memory is developing in Bangladesh that is close to European in terms of meaning but stems from the political opposition and grassroots initiatives.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Taslima Akhter

(b. 1985, Kustanay, USSR; lives and works in Yekaterinburg)
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Lookbook, 2014 Installation, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist
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In her Lookbook project, started in 2014, Anastasia Bogomolova combined offcuts of cloth left by her grandmother with colorful dresses from her mother&rsquo;s wardrobe, 1980s fashion magazines, and clothing made for her using old patterns and vintage fabrics. Borrowing the lookbook format from fashion, where the term refers to a brand&rsquo;s seasonal collection, in 2016, in the eponymous photobook, Bogomolova appeared in the role of a Russian Cindy Sherman, trying on her mother&rsquo;s clothes, reconstructing the beauty ideals of past eras, and demonstrating an amazing transformability. The game of disguise, in the spirit of children&rsquo;s imitation of adults, is in Bogomolova&rsquo;s case driven by the desire to understand the notions of the body and sexuality&nbsp;inherited from previous generations and to recognize herself in them. The new version of the installation shown at Garage has been previously been exhibited in Minsk, Ufa, Nizhny Tagil, and Chelyabinsk, where it included old wardrobes and dressing-tables, ironing boards, sewing accessories, hangers, and mirrors. In this iteration, the installation is reduced to a cutting table and a strip which runs along the the entire installation, imitating an endless roll of floral ornament. In the context of The Fabric of Felicity, Lookbook harks back to photos of the &ldquo;amazons of the avant-garde&rdquo; wearing outfits made from fabrics they had designed. It also reflects strategies of compensating for the eternal shortages and limited range of Soviet consumer production through the practice of individual tailoring.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Anastasia Bogomolova

(b. 1944, Eberswalde, Germany; lives and works in Cologne)
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III 2003 C-print, 85 x 85 cm Courtesy of the artist &copy; Candida H&ouml;fer, K&ouml;ln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018
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In his 2002 article &ldquo;Museums in Late Democracies,&rdquo; Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty distinguishes two types of knowledge among contemporary museum visitors: archival and experiential. The archival type is oriented toward strict classification. A visitor with experiential knowledge attempts to interact with the museum object directly. According to Chakrabarty, ethnographic museums in the twenty-first century have been forced to abandon archival methods in favor of the experiential approach. As a result of anti-colonialist criticism, access to museum objects has been opened up to representatives of the nationalities and communities that originally created them. Candida H&ouml;fer&rsquo;s photograph, made a year after the publication of Chakrabarty&rsquo;s article, shows the archival approach in its pure form. The brilliant white figures of ethnographers restoring artifacts from Africa without any physical contact seem to be incarnations of &ldquo;academic models of knowledge&rdquo; that &ldquo;privilege information that, supposedly, the brain processes [&hellip;] and marginalise the senses&rdquo; (Chakrabarty, 11). H&ouml;fer recalls that she too had to wear a white chemical protection suit: &ldquo;Ethnographers examine their objects as if they carry a hidden magic or even a curse.&rdquo; The white suits form the boundary between the highly developed (and sterile) sphere of European civilization and other cultures, where smells, rituals, and direct interaction with objects are of paramount importance.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Candida Höfer

(b. 1984, Umtata, South Africa; lives and works in Johannesburg and Cape Town)
The Night of the Long Knives #1, 2013 Archival inkjet print, 150 x 193 cm (exhibition copy) Photo: Hayden Phipps Courtesy of the artist and WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town
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This photo is part of the multi-year project The Future White Women of Azania by South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. This series of performances, sculptures, photographs, and carpets describes the labyrinths of identity in South Africa after the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela became the country&rsquo;s President and abolished those laws that divided the population into racial groups and included a ban on interracial marriages, doing business outside zones allocated to the black population, and other inhuman rules. During apartheid, some of its opponents united under the flag of Azania, an African Atlantis that had supposedly existed before the first colonizers arrived. After Mandela&rsquo;s death in 2013, right-wing politicians frightened South African citizens with tales of the &ldquo;night of the long knives&rdquo; which black people would allegedly organize against whites. Ruga defines his project as a &ldquo;procession,&rdquo; &ldquo;a nonverbal way that convinces one of a bond.&rdquo; He sees his balloon outfit as a kind of armor and recalls the Russian constructivist artists who &ldquo;lifted it up to something god-like.&rdquo; Mass demonstrations in the young Soviet Republic were all about affirming revolutionary equality and abolishing class differences. In his work, Ruga calls into question identity itself and argues that any symbolism dividing people into classes and races is empty inside and insignificant.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Athi-Patra Ruga

(b. 1970, Seine-Saint-Denis, France; lives and works in Berlin and Algiers)
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La Mer Morte, 2015 Installation. Clothes and 3 lightboxes, 130 x 160 x 18 cm each Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul
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The installation by Kader Attia, a French artist of Algerian origin, combines two works of different periods. The photographs in lightboxes belong to the series Square Rocks (2008) and depict a quay in the Bab el Oued neighborhood of Algiers. Local teenagers gaze dreamily out to sea, but escape is impossible: the cement blocks are piled here deliberately, to prevent any boat, large or small, from mooring. The other part of the installation is located on the floor. Ready-made clothing in shades of blue and azure imitates the sea. This is an ephemeral monument to those refugees who died on their way to Europe. Over the last few years, the Mediterranean sea has become a dead sea or, rather, &ldquo;the Sea of the Dead.&rdquo; Thousands of refugees from Libya, where a civil war has raged since 2014, have attempted to reach Italy by crossing the Mediterranean. On July 1, 2018, the number of dead and missing reached one thousand. The war in Libya is a direct&nbsp;consequence of the Arab Spring, a NATO-supported mass movement which aimed to bring about regime change in Arab countries. Malian writer Manthia Diawara considers Attia&rsquo;s installation to represent the search for a &ldquo;common place,&rdquo; as the post-colonial writer &Eacute;douard Glissant understood it, a space where nations and cultures meet despite the differences in their origin and biography. Instead of portraying individual victims Attia used jeans and T-shirts, garments worn by refugees and migrants worldwide, as well as by city-dwellers. What they have in common is the search for a better life.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Kader Attia

(b. 1933, Tokyo; lives and works in New York)
Cut Piece, 1964 Performance Courtesy of the artist
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Pioneering performance artist Yoko Ono was one of the first to use instructions as a method of creating artworks. Event scores, the use of which would become widespread within the Fluxus movement and conceptualism, were more like Zen kōans (parables) in terms of their impact and paradoxicality when used by Ono. The anti-war 1964 performance Cut Piece, in which viewers were invited to climb on stage and cut off a piece of clothing from the motionless, seated artist, combined a pacifist message with implicit aggression and violence. Repeated many times in different cities across the globe, this performance (or, as the artist came to call it, striptease show), quickly became a classic of feminist art, which was partly due to the song Woman is the Nigger of the World, co-written by Ono and John Lennon, a few years later.
At Garage, the famous performance, which can also be interpreted as a distribution of gifts or a kind of &ldquo;fabric potlatch,&rdquo; will be performed by the artist Anastasia Potemkina on the last day of the exhibition, January 27, 2019. The artist&rsquo;s dress will be made of African wax print cotton. Printed batik from Senegal has a complex history: in the nineteenth century, the Dutch colonizers organized the industrial production of cloth imitating traditional Indonesian (mainly Javanese) batik, but the innovation did not take hold. The entrepreneurs were forced to export their invention from Indonesia to West Africa, where the colored fabrics quickly gained popularity and subsequently became a symbol of the national struggle for independence.
<div class="author">Iaroslav Volovod</div>

Yoko Ono

(b. 1976, Larache, Morocco; lives and works in Amsterdam)
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Zee-man, 2017 Oil on linen, 150 x 200 cm Courtesy of the artist and Nouvelles Images Gallery, The Hague
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&ldquo;Free of the white person&rsquo;s gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms,&rdquo; philologist Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote in 1988. &ldquo;Repetition and correction are fundamental to black artistic forms.&rdquo; Such techniques are very characteristic of the work of Hamid El-Kanbouhi, a Moroccan who moved to Amsterdam at the age of nineteen. In the painting Zee-man, the background of a traditional European portrait is complemented with elements of collage (three men in the upper part of the canvas), but instead of spatial connectivity, the artist uses a collision of painting rhythms on different surfaces. The painting emerges as a platform for the intertwining of types of self-representation in the European and Arab worlds. A portrait is a pose that distinguishes a person from the mass and turns them into an object of worship or desire. In recent times, thanks to realist artists and early photographers, the social function of a portrait has come to involve the revision of social strata. This review can have humanistic aims (as is the case for the Wanderers, a group of nineteenth-century Russian artists who placed the urban and rural poor at the forefront of their paintings), as well those related to police surveillance. In a modern city, however, there are communities that oppose total identification for religious and personal reasons, preferring to exclude themselves from the general catalogue of individuals. The name of El-Kanbouhi&rsquo;s painting can be interpreted as a hint at dissolution on the atomic level. In physics, the Zeeman effect is the splitting of the spectrum into several components as the result of a magnetic field. For the artist, the role of the magnetic field is played by the multicultural city, where a multitude of communities (components) have appeared as a result of post-colonial political changes.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Hamid El-Kanbouhi

(b. 1981, Rostov-on-Don; lives and works in Moscow and Milan)
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Green Flag (Gemma, T.V., D.M., Cesarina, A.R., B.R., P.G., D.S., Rosanna, L.F., Luisa, V.R., F.G., Lucia, C.Mariuccia, P.S., S.A., M. Anna, N.B., Q.A, P. Iolanda, C.M., B.F., G.M., M.G., C.A., M. Norma, Olga Laura, L.L., M.G., R.L., P.E., L.G., M.V., C.I., Mirella Bertecco, P.A., C.G., Norina, A.M., C. Mariuccia, M.S., S.G., Coda Caselia Maria, P.L., Maria, E.G., I.T., M. P., I.P., A.A., M.L., Magda Salvetti, Lella Luigina, B.L., Albertina, A.R., Elsa, L.A., R.L., M.P., Giuse, V.G., L.A., P.G., I.L., O.I., C.O., M.Lucia, Lina, T.I., Sala Ines, B. Francesca, M. Dalia, F.G., C.G., A.R., Bottino Rita, Romentino R, M.C., R.S., G.R., R.T., DCI, N. L., F.R., G.P., M.N., C.P., D.Meri, V.F, ZAM, B.G., Eliana, B.M., Negro Angela, L.S., Vittoria Cantone, P.A., M.P., Mosca Rina, A. F., Lorenzon Teresina, Vilma, Loiodice Mari, N.M., F.O., Dolores, C.C., Maria Pozzo, B.R., Bosetti Mari, Maria, G.L., N.L., A.A., R.G., E.C., Maria, L.L., A.M., Pera Piera, M.E., A.V., C.G., DLI, Orso Rosanna, Marchesini Iole, A.A., C.Carolina, C.R., N.R., V.F., B.A., M.Z., Z.Anna, Rosa, Paola, F. Gianna, Gina, L.R.E, Elsa, GA.E., E.M., A.E., L.I., B.G., Bruzadore Gina, L.R., B.F., A.M., A.N., M.A., C.R., Porrino C., Tonetto Elda, A.Rosina, R.M., N.R., M.G., M.A., T.M., A.R., P.A., G.D., B.M.R., B.Elsa, [illegible], C.L., S.M., Viviana, N.C., F.A., B.R., C.E., Giuseppina, M.Adelina), 2018
&ldquo;To the workers of the Rivetti wool weaving factory of Biella and Vigliano. From the workers of the spinning and weaving factory of Tollegno&rdquo; Archival inkjet print, 70 х 105 cm Courtesy of the artist
Blue Flag (Corina, Maria, Gina, Giacinta, B.Maria, R.Norma, Pina, Silvana, Ginia, Clelia, Onorina, Elvira, Maria, Luciana, Lina, Anna P., Ines, Cibin Adriana, Rastello Idina, Mariuzzo Romilda, Gianna, Ramazzina S., Anna, Moro Regina, Ada, Vittoria, Maria, [Illegible], Mirella, Piera, PIA, Giovanna, Hamid El-Kanbouhi, Anna, Franca, Maria, Liliana Vagli, M. F., Teresa, Lucia Elda, Lea, Laura, Celestina, C.G., Orsingher Cecilia, Primina, Nores, Iole, Vallera Maria, Anita, ADA, Stefania, D.S., Lidia, Maria, Anna, Laura, Dirce, Marconato Bertilla, M. Isabella, Silli, Dina, Mary, G.Enrichetta, Giuseppina, Cappelletto Amelia, Matt&eacute; Teresilla, Mina, Dorina, Rosalba, Edvige, Ramella Maria, Angela, Liliana, Giannina, B.T., T.I., Flavia, Maria, Delfina, Mariuccia, R.C.Maria, R.B. Rosita, Dilva, Libera, Rita, Piera, Edda, Dirce, A.E., N.F., Ravetti Mary, Salvetti Giorgina, Anna, Armida, Merina, Maria, Silvia, Rita, Silva, Rita, Mazzia Ernestina, Iole, Musso Rosa, Anna, Rosa, Carla, Lina, Livia, Ines, Mazzia Gilda, Maria, Bertini Antonieta, Rosso V., Sofia, Lea, Piera, Felicita, Silvia, Carla, Marisa, R. Rita-Anita, Pozzato Vanni, E.B., Elvira, Mara, Bianca, Isa, Rina, Motta Ida, Lia, Deloisa, Morzone Regina, Ada, Bonetti Anna, Angela, Egle Ramella, Lucia, Ester, Bice, Dellavalle Gisa, Nergo Maria, Jole, Eva Edmea, Nice Maria, Dina, Nanda, Vera, M. Edmea, Marisa, T. Anna, Annetta), 2018
&ldquo;To the workers of the spinning and weaving factory of Tollegno. From the workers of the Rivetti wool weaving factory of Biella and Vigliano&rdquo; Archival inkjet print, 70 х 105 cm Courtesy of the artist
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Vladislav Shapovalov&rsquo;s new project is based on his research in the archive of the General Italian Confederation of Labor in Biella, Italy, and complements the research in Ivanovo carried out by the curators of The Fabric of Felicity. In the Soviet era, this city, which was the home of the Russian cotton industry, had close trade union contacts with Biella, the famous Italian wool production center in the Piedmont region. Addressing the workers&rsquo; political struggle, the artist selected from the archive two unique flags dated 1962 with the &ldquo;autographs&rdquo; of female factory workers. One of the embroidered names, Felicit&agrave;, translates as happiness or felicity, echoing the title of the exhibition. The labor of textile workers, simultaneously enslaving and emancipating, is always anonymous: only the name of the fashion house appears along the edge of the roll of fabric and on the label of the finished product. The two flags, created for an exchange between the two factories shortly before one of them was closed, offers rare evidence of textile workers as subjects on the historical stage. In the 1980s, the Italian fashion industry largely transferred production to eastern Europe and China. Recently, however, illegal factories using migrant labor began returning to the homeland of fashion houses such as Cerruti and Ermenegildo Zegna. In this sense, the struggle of the Italian textile workers of the 1960s and 1970s is a historical experience which remains contemporary.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Vladislav Shapovalov

(b. 1978, Marin, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles)
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Accessory to Protest: Hoodie Negative, 2011 Unique constructed negative: organza, metal zipper, size Small, 119 x 76 cm
Accessory to Protest: Sneaker Negative, 2011 Unique constructed negative, resin, size 11 30.48 x 12.7 x 12.7 cm
Accessory to Protest: Hoodie (Yellow), 2011 Unique chromogenic photogram, 114.3 x 81.28 cm
Accessory to Protest 8: Yellow Sneakers, 2011 Unique chromogenic photogram, 60.96 x 76.32 cm
Accessory to Protest: Flyer Photograph, 2011 Unique silver gelatin photograms from constructed negatives and performance, 243.84 x 203.2 cm each Courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles
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The photogram has a glorious history: Man Ray, L&aacute;szl&oacute; Moholy-Nagy, and other avant-garde pioneers experimented with the projection of light directly onto physical objects placed on photographic paper. American artist Farrah Karapetian turns objects related to such domains of the invisible as sound and anonymity into transparent shells of silicone, ice, organza, and other materials, and then proceeds to create photograms. In the series of photograms and &ldquo;sculptural negatives&rdquo; entitled Protest Accessories, Karapetian is inspired by the dress codes of activists who aim to overthrow the existing order, in this case those who protested Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring. The photograms reproduce&mdash;and significantly magnify&mdash;a brochure instructing demonstrators how to dress so that the police do not recognize them on video. Two &ldquo;sculptural negatives&rdquo; transform clothing from this brochure into an ideal uniform of invisibility, a pure political force without identificatory attributes such as sex and age.
<div class="author">Valentin Diaconov</div>

Farrah Karapetian

&nbsp;(b. 1962, Moscow; lives and works in Moscow)
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Hymns. Rehearsals, 2007 6-channel video installation, 5&rsquo; 19&rdquo; Courtesy of the artist
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An attentive observer of Russian reality, Olga Chernysheva captures the face of the new corporate culture on the eve of the global economic crisis. In six short videos, employees of various companies, dressed in uniforms or according to an office dress code, perform the corporate anthems of their companies. Chernysheva demonstrates the striking gap between the imposed rehearsal of corporate identity and personal self-awareness: the bathos of a song glorifying a company is mocked by the out-of-tune performance; the collective body keeps crumbling and disintegrating even while singing. Focusing on one person or another in the general chorus, the camera reveals their feelings, be it awkward shyness, pensive sorrow or genuine enthusiasm reminiscent of Soviet childhood singalongs performed by the young pioneers. We are forced to consider the continuity between the new corporate roles and the former ideological ones. In 1997, Chernysheva made the series Inner Light from photographs of performances by amateur ensembles at a Soviet cultural center. In the context of that series, Hymns can be read as an awkward attempt by modern Russian society to reconstruct the lost collective feeling that is still close to the heart of the last Soviet generation. Curiously, the origin of the word &ldquo;hymn&rdquo; is associated with the Greek verb &phi;&alpha;ί&nu;&omega;&mdash;&ldquo;to weave.&rdquo; The &ldquo;woven&rdquo; song about &ldquo;a brand like a friend,&rdquo; performed with a Russian accent, thus becomes part of the surprisingly diverse texture of the exhibition.
<div class="author">Ekaterina Lazareva</div>

Olga Chernysheva

The title of the exhibition hails from Jeremy Bentham&rsquo;s treatise An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), in which the philosopher argues that the path to a just social structure&mdash;the &ldquo;fabric of felicity&rdquo;&mdash;lies in a universal &ldquo;utility principle.&rdquo;
Global trade routes and the production cycles of raw materials, fabric, and ready-to-wear garments&mdash; the &ldquo;Silk Road&rdquo; of the twenty-first century&mdash;help define the geography of this exhibition, which is based on research veering from Stockholm to Dhaka, from Ivanovo to Biella, along the way debunking stereotypical notions of East and West, the Global North and South, and affirming the fundamental equality of artistic techniques, methods, and traditions around the globe. As a result, the principles of working with the material emerge as more important than national or cultural borders.
Beyond the context of fashion-as-a-work-of-art, our understanding of clothing is closely connected to the fabric of everyday life, particularly within the sphere of the circulation of objects. In a new project by Narva Alvarado, a sweatshirt with the logo of an American university&mdash;a hot commodity in Bolivia&rsquo;s flea markets&mdash;becomes the uniform for students from the university in Warisata, a town largely populated by the indigenous Aymara people. As part of Goldin+Senneby&rsquo;s piece, Standard Length of a Miracle, fashion designer Tigran Avetisyan created work clothes for the Museum invigilators from garments left behind in the dry cleaners of Moscow and St. Petersburg. For her project, Second Hand, Zhanna Kadyrova &ldquo;sewed&rdquo; a dress from the tiles decorating the interior of the Museum.
The processes governing our appearance, both macroeconomic and symbolic, can be described by the speculative concept of &ldquo;Krishna Capitalism,&rdquo; in which the Indian god Krishna and Capitalism as a social formation each play a significant role in the global circulation of looks and clothes, dictating colors, cut, and working hours. They are both complicit in overproduction of textiles, either as a woman&rsquo;s guardian deity in the case of Krishna or as a driver of fast fashion&rsquo;s ubiquity in the case of capitalism, and in the situation of contemporary textile industry their invisible hands are morally ambiguous. Several of the artists examine these processes in politics and society through the prism of clothing and the textile industry, with the clothing itself often serving as a metaphor for the victims of humanitarian or ecological catastrophes. Examples of this type of work can be found in Kamruzzaman Shadhin&rsquo;s Haven is Elsewhere or Kader Attia&rsquo;s installation La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea). The struggle for rights for workers in the textile industry&mdash;a problem that has vexed society since the middle of the nineteenth century&mdash;often appears as the subject matter in projects at the intersection of art and political activism. Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann use the visual means of infographics to compare the strikes of Indian textile workers in 1982 with the boycotts of Italian factories in the 1970s. The photographs of Vladislav Shapovalov depict flags with the names of workers from textile factories in the Italian city of Biella, while Taslima Akhter&rsquo;s photo documentation from the site of the sewing workshop that collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013 speaks to the fate of the newest victims of the &ldquo;fast fashion&rdquo; industry.
The majority of the works presented here are located between two conceptual poles: the uniform and the universal form. The photographs of Candida H&ouml;fer capture museum restorers in their coveralls, protecting them from the (sometimes literally) toxic legacy of a colonial past. Farrah Karapetian notes the near-universal attire of political activists, allowing those protesting in Egypt to &ldquo;slip under the radar&rdquo; of the police. Taking a form reminiscent of a museum of natural history, Sharon Kivland&rsquo;s installation catalogues the dress codes from the era of the French Revolution. In his video, The Street and Modern Life, Hans Eijkelboom blurs the boundaries between everyday attire and a uniform, while the collective Factory of Found Clothes confronts gender codes by having the uniformed cadets of the naval academy carry white dresses, a universal sign of the &ldquo;feminine.&rdquo;
The search for a universal form is something that has fueled the historical avant-garde, as well as postwar abstraction. The Fabric of Felicity surveys major developments in the avant-garde&rsquo;s experiments with textiles, from the formulation of a rational outfit, unfettered by fashion trends, to new geometric patterns for fabric. Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova saw in such developments an egalitarian potential far removed from the kingdom of flowers and paisley patterns of the old world, with its rampant inequality. In the sketches of Ellsworth Kelly, one can observe the opposite impulse: a progression not from abstraction to clothing, but rather from clothing to abstraction. Both vectors converge in Alexandra Galkina&rsquo;s painting series Skirts.
Clothing as a medium for engaging in conversation with one&rsquo;s ancestors and the spirits is one of the focal points for artists working with &ldquo;chthonic fashion.&rdquo; Lydia Masterkova builds her Palace from fabrics found in destroyed churches and her grandmother&rsquo;s trunk, creating a spiritual reality parallel to Soviet modernization literally from scraps. In the work Ciguapa Pantera, Firelei B&aacute;ez addresses the mythology of her home country, the Dominican Republic, while Hayv Kahraman turns to traditional Persian and Arabic miniatures in her search to understand her own identity, and Portia Zvavahera&rsquo;s painting brings symbols from the mythology of India and Zimbabwe together under a single veil of translucent fabric. These works about the legendary past and mythological creatures are joined by a photograph by Athi-Patra Ruga, depicting a grotesque image of a future citizen of the utopian country of Azania.
A separate section is dedicated to the &ldquo;birthday suit.&rdquo; According to fashion historian Anne Hollander, in European culture, nudity was accepted as a special type of attire, a visual extrapolation of &ldquo;with native honor clad.&rdquo; An ironic variation of this &ldquo;outfitting&rdquo; can be found in the works of Huguette Caland, Katalin Ladik, Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, and Jimmy DeSana. The political aspect to nudity is explored in the photographs of Pedro Valtierra, capturing the naked strike of Mexican miners, which took place in 1985.
Valentin Diaconov, Ekaterina Lazareva, Iaroslav Volovod

Shifra Kazhdan and Ksenia Peretrukhina

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